CSC 341: January 24, 2007

Instructor's notes for the class session

I'm planning to demonstrate some of the features of Mediawiki and its interface:

Accessing the wiki. I've added a link from the course Web site to the course front door on this wiki, and I imagine people will bring up the wiki either by following that link or by bookmarking that entry point.
Logging in (I'll distribute passwords in class).
Following links.
Editing wiki pages.
Previewing pages.
Writing summaries.
Saving one's edits.
Moving (= renaming) pages.
Help pages.
Special pages.
Logging out.

Editing is straightforward, but I plan to mention how the various special effects look in wiki source:

Note: for a more extensive syntax list, go to CSC 341: Wiki syntax

The markup enclosed by the "math" tags is not Mediawiki markup and is not HTML or XHTML or XML markup. What is it, and where can one learn about it?
How do you do tables in wiki pages?
A sequence of four tildes has a special interpretation in wiki markup. What is the effect of including that string in a wiki page?
How can you find out who wrote or modified a wiki page?
Suppose you write something in a wiki page, and someone else replaces what you write with something else that is either incorrect or inapposite, and you change it back, and the other person changes it again, and so on. How can you confer with the other person to reach an agreement on what the passage should say?

It is in LaTeX, a markup language for math. You can learn about it using texts in the MathLAN. My favorite text Math Into LaTeX. This page also provides links to many online resources about LaTeX.
See this help page about tables.
The string "~~~~" will be replaced by your name and a time-and-date stamp.
Use the history page.
Use the discussion page.